Tag Archives: purpose

Growing Soup

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When my daughter Jane was small, she would put her hands on her hips and declare indignantly, “When I grow up. .  . I’ll stay up as long as I want. I’ll watch as much TV as I want, or I won’t clean my room unless I want to.” We smiled and let her complain.

Sooner than I imagined, Jane was in her twenties, with an undergraduate degree, no job or clear vocation, wanting a car, and those things that come with growing up. I remember her declaring to me, “All my life, I’ve wanted to grow up, and now that I am, I don’t like it. Nothing is the way I thought it would be.”

Those words could well apply to me and growing older. Unlike Jane, I was never in a rush to grow old, but still, I’ve been doing exactly that, making me inclined to say, “Nothing is the way I thought it would be. My body just can’t do what it once could.” Some days I rail against these changes. I want 45-year-old Karen back. I plan exercises and diets that will magically restore me. I adopt schedules to take better care of myself. I resolve to make new friends, find a passion or renewed purpose in an unknown something. Maybe I’ll paint a bird house, make a resistance hat, or start making my own bread. Maybe I’ll do all of these things – or something else that is different.

But I still go to bed another day older.

This morning, reading a Lenten meditation by Parker Palmer, I saw another way to consider growing older. He argues that although we were originally an agricultural society, tied to seasons of growth and rest, we are now a manufacturing one, and the “master metaphor of our era” comes from manufacturing. Rather than “growing” our lives, we make them. He notes our everyday speech: “We make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love”.

I wondered, could I reframe growing older into a positive perspective?: I could ask how can I grow time, grow friends, grow meaning, grow money, grow living, and grow love? I could move on from the “making” approach that probably fits much of adulthood and embrace the growing in growing old.

One suggestion for growing old is from Cynthis Bourgeault’s Ten Practical Guidelines for Conscious Aging.Number 5 is:

Watch what happens when you try to draw energy from an outmoded image of yourself.. . .You get an immediate rush of ‘Ah, I’m my old self again!!’ But that is exactly who you do not want to be. Your old self is the sacrificial lamb you will lay upon the altar of your deeper becoming.

Sounds like Bourgeault is talking about hanging onto our former self versus growing into a deeper becoming. I have no idea of what the “deeper becoming” might be, but I’m willing to find out.

As I engage with these ideas—growing instead of making myself into the perfect aging senior, I’m reminded of my second husband, Gary.  Gary did not cook at all. When I met him, he lived on Special K for breakfast and Healthy Choice frozen meals for lunch and dinner. When we married and forgot to say “no presents,” someone gave us a crock pot. Gary thought it was the greatest cooking invention ever.

He loved homemade soup, and the crock pot was perfect for making it. I’d be off to the office in the morning and he’d say. “I think I’ll make some soup today. What do you think should be in it?” I’d add some broth and maybe leftover chicken and, as I ran out the door, suggest that we could add noodles later.

While I was gone, Gary grew the soup, scouring the refrigerator for leftovers and the cupboards for things that might add flavor. I’d come home to a completely different amalgam of soup than the one I left. He grew the soup with what we had and with his imagination. And like many things that grow, some soups were forgettable, others unexpectedly outstanding.  But because they grew organically, there was no recipe for replicating any particular soup, and that’s what made his soups so interesting.

While I was busy making a life, I was also growing my own life soup, with a variety of personal experiences. Some have turned out great and others I wish I could do over and would just as soon forget. But in the end, it’s the growing that counted.

The other Karen mentioned in her blog, Who Is the Old Lady Directing the Circus? “growing down,” acting with greater spontaneity and less regard for the product than the process. Surely by 82, I’ve earned the right to grow up, down, or sideways. I hope I can grow like Gary’s soup, adding wisdom from my cupboard of life and a pinch of adventure, stirring in love and more love to taste. 

Leftovers

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Phase 1 of the holiday season – Thanksgiving. I always say it’s my favorite because there are no presents involved. I’m not sure that’s true, but it suggests I have an altruistic side.

Now, with the holiday over and another approaching, I’m thinking about leftovers. Don’t you love them? The best part of Thanksgiving!

Leftover 1: Gratitude.  Last year neither of my two children and their spouses wanted to host Thanksgiving. They seemed to have caught the rest of the country’s malaise about it, too much work, with football and maybe turkey as the only reasons to get together. But, remember, I’m the person who says it’s my favorite of the holidays, so it seemed appropriate that I step up and host.

I was new in my apartment after selling Jim’s and my house, which had been the center of many family events. Could I possibly host Thanksgiving? In an apartment? I remembered a favorite movie, Hannah and Her Sisters, where Mia Farrow hosts her big family in a New York City apartment. If Hannah could do it, surely I could. So, I hosted Thanksgiving with good help from my family. And it worked. We gave Hannah some competition.

As that 2024 Thanksgiving grew to a close, we were scheduled to move to another family’s house for dessert, a tradition we started several years ago. But I was exhausted. I’d burned my wrist draining the potatoes, and it hurt. The kitchen was presentable, and all I wanted to do was sit and watch mindless TV—yes, something even more mindless than football. So I didn’t go. AND I announced that I was passing the baton—someone else had better step up and do Thanksgiving next year.

 “I am too old for all this work, and I’ve done my share!”

So, when Thanksgiving came around this year, my daughter stepped up, yet somehow, on the morning of Thanksgiving, I found myself responsible for an apple pie and the mashed potatoes. Everything that could go wrong did, and I barely finished in time to get to my daughter’s house.

During the entire time in my kitchen, I whined to myself, “I passed that baton. This is ridiculous. These potatoes are pathetic, mushed, not mashed potatoes, and the pie. Why did I agree to sit and peel apples and potatoes? And what’s wrong with my kids that they wanted mashed potatoes from Costco? Have I raised lazy children? . . . ya da ya da ya da.”

And then it hit me – sometimes the Universe does need to smack you pretty hard. I realized that husband #1; husband #2; husband #3; some old boyfriends and my sister (all deceased) would have given anything to be in my shoes: 81 and still mashing potatoes and partying with family

Who cares about potatoes or pie—I was getting to enjoy Thanksgiving with everyone I love. I was getting to make pie and potatoes for them. Getting to do this (see https://designingyour.life/), became my new mantra. My resentful, “I HAVE TO” went “puff” and left the room, leaving gratitude in its place.

Leftover 2: Intergenerational Conversation. Last year as dinner ended, we started a discussion about AI. Everyone at the table had a stake in AI. I was teaching an undergraduate writing course and struggling to convince students that you can’t learn to write if ChatGPT writes your paper.

The discussion was fast and fun; no one left the table to watch more football, which means something. We are a family of frogs, we jump into the pond quickly. Our one turtle, Luisa, is often left standing on the bank; she jumps in later, usually with great wisdom.

This year, we’d finished eating and were lingering in the kitchen, snitching bites of dressing and turkey. Elizabeth, my daughter-in-law, asked her 24-year-old son, Henrik, if he wants to have children. I don’t remember how we landed there, maybe because two of our young people are about to graduate from college. Henrik never did answer, but the question kicked off another great discussion about the uncertainty of the future, mainly the planet, and how grim it looks to Gen Z.

The future, by definition, is uncertain, but what my Gen Z grandchildren are feeling is more complicated than uncertainty. The word, “existential” kept floating up. Generation Z young people ask different questions about meaning, purpose and identity than the Silent Generation or even the Boomers did. As we talked, they hesitated to share their dreams for their futures, wary of the future of the planet and climate change.

I can’t recapture the opinions, but I concluded that young people are facing problems unique to our time with climate change at the heart of them, especially as the world responds. They are terrified, although they didn’t use that word. (Remember this is an “n” of 3, so ask your own Gen Zers). And yes, we hid under our desks because of nuclear bomb threats, but this is different.

Reflecting later, I realized we had had a family conversation that crossed generations. Gratitude welled even greater in me, couched in concern for my grandchildren. I was, nevertheless, grateful for the sharing across generations.

Leftover 3: Hope. We eventually moved to more mundane topics, but I worried that what I was hearing might be despair. I didn’t want them to throw in the towel for a life of hedonism. So, I later questioned the Gen Z grandchildren separately.

I started with Henrik, “You aren’t giving up on dreams for your life, are you? Embracing a life of hedonism—do you even know what that is?” (Who knows what they teach in college anymore.)

“Don’t worry, and yes, I know what hedonism is. For now, I don’t know what I’m doing after graduation, but you know me, I’m just curious about it all.”

Whew!

Later, in my car with Luisa, who you will remember is our family turtle, never jumping in too soon, I asked her about her aspirations. She gave me even more hope, summing her thoughts up as “I don’t want to miss my life waiting around for the end of the earth, so I’m living it.”

Upon hearing those words, my gratitude for the day swelled into hope. Yes, the situation in the US and worldwide, especially climate, looks dire, hopeless, gloomy, depressing. . . you get it. But along comes Thanksgiving, and the leftovers. We engage in meaningful conversations and emerge with hope, nurtured by connection and making meaning together.

Another LEFTOVER:

From Wendell Berry, Think Little

. . . the world is blessed beyond my understanding, more abundantly than I will ever know. What lives are still ahead of me here to be discovered and exulted in, tomorrow, or in twenty years?

What’s It All About: Just in Time for 2025

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I walk down the hall of my new apartment building. Every doorway looks the same, gray, an apartment number, and a light to the side. Gray stretches indefinitely, soulless. I wonder if someday I’ll get lost in the sameness. I am a small, insignificant, older woman, putting one foot in front of the other in my daily trek to get my mail and newspaper, small things tethering me to the outside world.

          Here it is 2025, and I’m still asking myself what it’s all about. When I was seven or eight, I’d scare myself by worrying that I was an actor in someone else’s dream. I didn’t exist. How could I be sure I existed, that I was real? And if I was real, why did I exist? I had no answer other than to immediately divert my mind and think about the next day when I’d call a friend to play with me.

Then college. I registered for a humanities course, with no idea of what humanities was except a requirement to graduate. In a crowded room in Ford Hall, I learned I wasn’t alone in doubting my existence. A French guy named Descartes asked himself the same question about his dreams and concluded “I think, therefore I am.” Had it been that simple all along, and I was just too young to see it?

Once I established my existence—after all a famous philosopher had confirmed it—I started to focus on why I existed—what was human existence all about?

Next was the 1966 movie, Alfie. I was 23 and about to marry. If you saw the movie, you know that Alfie, played by Michael Caine, is a handsome womanizer, oblivious to the pain he causes the women he “loves” and leaves. One lover has a son, and Alfie becomes a father. Alfie begins to attach emotionally, but then the mother takes the boy away. Alfie denies his loss by finding another woman, who’s married, and he gets her pregnant. She has an illegal abortion with Alfie present. There’s an incredible scene when he views the aborted fetus, and for the first time, Alfie faces his life.

The movie and the finality of the abortion has stuck in my head since 1966. It wasn’t the procedure itself that impressed upon my mind; I understood the woman’s reasons, Rather, it was the contrast between the hedonism that looked so attractive when Alfie lived it, and the woman’s dilemma, a life growing in her, but having that baby meant the possible loss of a husband and family, which, for all its problems was a life of meaning. The theme song still lives in my head, “What’s it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live? . . .” And here I am, 81 years old. I haven’t lived a life of hedonism, that’s probably why I made it to 81. But still I wonder what it is all about, especially as I look back, and realize my moment went by so quickly.

I’m guessing we all wonder what life is about. Having a purpose is touted as one route to an answer—of sorts. I recently heard about a program to inspire disengaged youth by helping them find a purpose. At the other end of the age continuum, we retirees are told that we’ll live longer and be happier if we find a purpose. Maybe we can all hide in our purpose and avoid the deeper question.

Then there’s the path of hedonism. I vividly remember my 50th high school reunion when we went around the room telling each other what we were doing with our lives fifty years after graduation. I was shocked by how many people bragged about their good lives of boating, dining, cocktails, and relaxing in Florida in the winter and Door County during summer (I grew up in Wisconsin). When it was my turn, there I stood, thinking life was about more than that. I stuttered that I was still working (my way of escaping the larger question).

Turning eighty pushed me to answer what it’s all about. It’s scary to me—I want to feel okay with my life because I don’t know what’s coming. I will always hear my mother, dying at 74, saying, “I’m not ready. There are things I need to do.”

A few Christmases ago my children gave me an Aura frame. It’s a tablet that flashes pictures at 15-second intervals. You load the pictures from your phone and other devices onto the tablet. At the time I was disappointed. “What am I going to do with this?” I thought.

Nevertheless, I placed the frame in a central spot, plugged it in, and synched with the Internet. There was my family. They had already loaded their favorite pictures of a growing, changing family of the past 25 years and even pictures from my and their childhoods. Gradually, I added some of my own and Jim’s family added pictures, too. I came to love my Aura. Jim and I would eat dinner at the dining room table and watch the screen, telling stories about the memories triggered by the pictures

Some days life reads like a fine novel. It’s all there: a great plot—my life; characters—family and friends I’ve loved; a climax—the 50’s and 60’s when family and work came to fruition; and now the denouement—old age and me asking once again, What is it all about, after all? It feels pressing, the need to know.

I walk into my apartment from my soulless hall, and there’s the Aura streaming my story line. I pause and watch: Jim, my sisters as children, our dog Eddie, Lake Michigan, my bicycles, our grandchildren, friend and fellow blogger, Karen, vacations, a big snapping turtle, a pileated woodpecker—you get the picture, family, friends, pets, this amazing planet, eighty remarkable years and memories, most everything I’ve loved and love. Aha, this is what it’s all about, I think.

The answer has been there all along, and I can give it to you in one word— love. It’s about love.

. . . for one human being to love another… is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. Rilke

My Perfect ‘Little p’

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Lake Harriet Community School

If you’re someone who’s followed this blog, you know that ‘little p’ refers to one of those small purposes that each of us carries out daily, purposes that make families run smoother, make people feel loved, and spread kindness. Things like volunteering at a book sale to raise money for scholarships, preparing and serving lunch at church after a funeral, and making sure family members have a good day. These are not grand purposes, but incrementally, they make life better.

A common ‘little p’ is volunteering. Although it’s almost a cliché to say that when we volunteer, we get more than we give, I have to indulge that cliché when I talk about tutoring, my ‘little p.’ I definitely get more than I give.

I have the perfect tutoring gig—four mornings a week at a nearby school in Minneapolis where my son is the principal, Lake Harriet Community School. It’s a small school, grades 3-5, and a highly successful school—a Minneapolis Public School that ranks 4th in the state. It’s also over a hundred years old, with shiny wood floors, heavy oak doors, windows, and woodwork, and tired classrooms, even though they’ve been kept up well. Like many districts, currently, it has children who were in primary school during the COVID shutdowns, and some are not ready for grade level work (we are avoiding calling them “behind.”). One way schools are addressing the needs of these children is through tutoring. That’s one reason I’m tutoring, specifically in math. The gift to me is that I AM NEEDED.

I tutor three small groups and then I help in a classroom. I’m on my feet for three hours, and on my toes mentally, even though it’s basic mathematics—in my day we called it arithmetic. Mathematics is not being taught the way you and I learned it or the way I taught thirty years ago. Now arrays are used to teach multiplication; children learn properties like commutative and identity; and algebraic thinking is introduced in first grade, etc. Clearly I must stretch mentally and find ways to teach new ways of doing arithmetic. That’s my second gift—keeping my brain challenged.

Then there are the obvious benefits, tutoring gets me out of bed and cleaned up early in the day; it gets me moving in natural ways rather than going to a gym; and my favorite, tutoring gives a purpose to my days.

Like other things we do in our mostly small lives, tutoring, at first, felt insignificant. I initially labeled it a feel-good way to spend some of my time in retirement. (By now you know I’m a hopeless cynic). I mean, how much difference can 2-4 hours a week make in a child’s mathematical growth? But to be an educator—which I am—is to believe fervently in small steps, small miracles of understanding. So, cynicism notwithstanding, a part of me believes what I do matters. I’m a caring adult in these children’s school experience who believes in them and supports them.

Yesterday, the impart of tutoring was resoundingly brought home to me. It occurred in the 4th grade class where my role is to hang out and help as needed. I’m the right hand “woman” to the teacher, who is especially creative and commanding when she teaches. She often starts the class period with a video that gives an example of kindness. Here’s a link to the video she showed yesterday. I urge you to watch it before you read further.

Please Enjoy before You Read On!

After viewing the video, the teacher asked students what was going on, what was the video about. Why were some residents in the nursing home tearing up? It took some time for these ten-year-olds to stop focusing on the gifts and to think about what was really going on for the residents. But they got there. As one little girl put it, “She showed that she cared about them.” That led to a discussion about loneliness. I’m not sure that all the children understood, but it was one of those small steps of learning.

For the remainder of the class we studied what to do with a remainder in division. That was fun and equally challenging. In my car on the way home, I reflected on the class in the context of the video. And suddenly I felt it, the biggest reason I tutor—I feel like I belong! I belong to this one classroom, to the other teachers I support with small groups, and in this small school. Best of all, I belong in a world that I care for because I know what individual children need.  I am doing my part to make this place and their lives better in small, incremental ways. 

If you want to find out more about Ruby, here’s her website:

https://3wishesproject.org/who-we-are/